The invention relates to a device for conveying poultry for slaughter, such as chickens, to a slaughtering plant, said device being provided with means for separating the chickens, separating the legs and taking up the legs of the chickens in clamps, and conveying the chickens hanging by their legs to a conveyor running through the slaughtering plant.
Such a device is known, for example from European Patent Application No. 0,044,362 or U.S. Pat. No. 4,307,683.
This known device is based on the principle that at the chicken farm, i.e. where there is a large quantity of chickens, they are driven into gangways which take the chickens in rows to a conveyor belt which carries the chickens via a leg spreader--which is provided for each row--to leg clamps, after which the chickens are taken in the clamps with their heads hanging down to a conveyor device and are then conveyed to the slaughtering plant. This method of collecting slaughter chickens seems very efficient, but it still has a large number of disadvantages. First of all, the chickens have to be rounded up, and there is a great deal of trouble to get them into the gangways. At the chicken farm, the collection has to take place in daylight, and chickens which one tries to drive towards a machine try to escape. The normal method of collecting the chickens by hand, by putting them in crates, works better in practice.
When the chickens have been placed with this known device in the conveyor unit, there often follows a long journey in which the chickens are in an undesirable position. This means that the quality of the meat deteriorates and that even some of the chickens are already dead on arrival at the slaughtering plant. These are then no longer suitable for slaughtering, since they have not been able to bleed.